Sen. Robert Menendez sent an open letter to Santa Claus via the Huffington Post website yesterday that was e-mailed far and wide. “I am writing out of concern, because you may have to move from the North Pole due to the dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice,” Menendez writes. “... I am worried about your safety and your ability to deliver billions of Christmas gifts if the ice cap on the North Pole no longer stays frozen all year. What will happen to your house, your workshop, the elves’ houses and your reindeer barns?”

Laugh and scoff if you want, but Menendez is on point. Polar ice is melting, and our addiction to fossil fuels is to blame. Cars and industries are spewing massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere. The resulting greenhouse effect is raising temperatures on the planet, wreaking havoc with weather patterns and increasing the intensity of storms and hurricanes.

President Obama didn’t win the climate change legislation he sought this past year, but he isn’t backing down on this important issue. The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday issued a 2011 timetable for setting emission standards at electric power plants and oil refineries, two of the largest sources of greenhouse gas or GHG pollution.

The agency will propose standards in July for power plants, next December for refineries, and host what it calls “listening sessions” to get feedback from business and industry. Final standards will be issued in 2012.

“We are following through on our commitment to proceed in a measured and careful way to reduce GHG pollution that threatens the health and welfare of Americans, and contributes to climate change,” EPA chief Lisa Jackson said.

Naysayers on climate change will challenge the EPA rules, and have already starting calling the regs “job-killers” with no benefits for the American people. They should get a lump of coal in their Christmas stockings. Except they’d probably burn it.